The Relationship of Records in Multiple Databases to Their Usage or Citedness

Papers in journals are indexed in bibliographic databases in varying degrees of overlap. The question has been raised as to whether papers that appear in multiple databases (highly overlapping) are in any way more significant (such as being more highly cited) than papers that are indexed in few databases. This paper uses a dataset from fuzzy set theory to compare low overlap papers with high overlap ones, and finds that more highly overlapping papers are in fact more highly cited.